32 API\IL 2, . 19.3 0 SHOUTS AND MURMURS AT 59 WASHINGTON SQUAR-é T HEN there is the story of cer- tain signs and portents observed in the Year of Grace, 1907, at 59 Washington Square. The central character is Will Irwin. And the story happens to be true. Or so he says. It was in Mr. Irwin's bachelor days, shortly after he had made a great name for himself in Park Row by the long- distance stories of the San Francisco earthquake which he pounded out on his typewriter in the ratty offices of the Newspaper That Was. His flat was an entire floor of this mouldering house in Washington Square, his space split up into two main rooms, with the bedroom in the rear and the living- room windows looking on the Square. N ow it is necessary to report first that as a youngster, Will Irwin had never had any fear of the dark. The black alleys of Chinatown in San Fran- cisco, the crazy stairs of our own Cher- ry Hill-into these he had plunged cheerfully in the pursuits of his trade. Indeed, he had never known what such a feeling was until he moved into Washington Square. Then he could not climb to his flat and put key into his lock without a vague apprehension that something in the dark on the other side of the .door was waiting to mischief him. Furthermore he would look up from his work twenty times a day be- cause he was continuously plagued by the notion that someone was standing in the doorway watching him. Finally, at three o'clock one morn- ing, he was yanked out of a sound sleep by a sense of someone bending over him. It was an experience quite new to him, a feeling of horror, inexplicable, incomm unicable, which left him rigid and clammy. Three mornings in suc- cession, always at the same hour and always, mind you, without sight or sound of any visitant, he was thus awakened. The adventure began to unstring his nerves. He could and did tell himself that the recurrent experi- ence was doubtless some symptom of indigestion but, after all, it did, even so, pIa y havoc with his sleep and he needed his sleep. So he moved to a hotel. Then, after a week of such incon- venient exile, a kind of sheepishness brought him back to his flat. Now he tried sleeping with every gas jet in the place burning full tilt. The phenome- non recurred, but then and thereafter with steadily lessening intensity. At last it dwindled to nothingness, and in time he forgot all about it. F ORGOT about it, that is, until he returned to town one morning after an absence during which he had turned his Rat over to James Hopper, his fellow-scribe who had come on from the West to look over the editors. On his return, Irwin found that fiery particle smouldering with resentment. Had he been uncomfortable? Had he? Mr. Hopper repeated the inquiry with a bitterness made more acrid by recent loss of sleep. Then, in reply, he poured out a story which varied from Irwin's own experience in only one particular. On the second night of the mute, in- visible visitation, Hopper, mantled in the fearsome darkness, had stood up in his nightgown and brandished a fist into space, bidding the ghost, if ghost it were, come out in the open and fight. The challenge was not accepted. The next crony to be honored by the doubtful boon of Irwin's hospitality and, during his stay, to undergo the same unnerving experience was Sam- uel Hopkins Adams. Of all who later bore witness, Mr. A.dams alone had heard the story first and so moved in with a mind prepared. But this would lessen the evidential force of his testi- mony only in the eyes of those who might not know how canny and ob- servant a skeptic was taking the stand. I can think of no more reliable witness for such an investigation unless it be that shrewd reporter who, you may remember, was once employed by the Times to keep an eye on Signora Pala- dino and who, in the midst of her most impressive séance, caught hold of the wandering and prehensile foot of that abstracted creature when, as I recall, it was toying with a tambourine up near the chandelier. But as that other alert investigator was none other than Will Irwin himself, I think of this story as uncommonly well buttressed. Finally, when Irwin was taking a holiday at Siasconsett two women, who were his neighbors at that New En- gland spa, borrowed the key of his flat for their own use during a week's visit to New York. On the morning after their arrival in Washington Square, they were to have breakfast at the Brevoort with an old friend who prom- ised to call for them at eight o'clock and escort them across the Square. When he kept his word, he found them waiting on the steps with their valises packed. They had been sitting there firmly since four o'clock that morning and they expressed an intention to spend the rest of their visit at some quiet hotel. Mr. Irwin could keep his old flat. As a matter of fact, he -didn't keep it. When October came around, he surrendered his lease and so passes out of a ghost story that is, I must admit, quite pain full y lacking in such essentials as banshee wailings and the dread clink of chains in the darkness. None of those who had bad nights at No. 59 will tell you they ever saw or heard anything at all and they become mere- ly incoherent when they try to describe what did befall them when they slept under its troubled roof. T HERE is one more witness. He was an old, old man who, two or three years after Irwin's time, came on from California for one last look at the Square where he had rolled his hoop as a .boy. No one of his day was still alive for him to talk to, so he had to get into conversations with nursemaids in the walks and bums on the benches and the policeman at the corner. He strayed into this story at all only be- cause, still wistfully in quest of someone to talk to about the old days, he went into a shop-to be frank, I am afraid it was a shoppe-which was kept on the south side of the Square by a friend of Irwin's. He told her all about the days when the Square was enclosed with a pretty picket fence and the Sev- enth Regiment used to drill on the green. He told of oldtimers who, when he was a lad, still remembered when Washington Square had been the Potter's Field and when the gallows had stood where the Arch stands now. "And that house there," said the old man, pointing to No. 59, "that used to be the Morgue." -ALEXANDER W OOLLCOTT